Paying Their Disrespects at Downey Cemetery : Vandalism: Problems include toppled tombstones, remnants of occult rituals. City officials respond by limiting hours.

In his 35 years at the Downey Cemetery, Hank Spears has seen some weird things left behind by visitors with a penchant for the occult--burnt candles, beribboned bird carcasses, even a decapitated goat.

But the thing with the coconuts leaves Spears scratching his head.

“Coconuts are a big thing now, for some reason,” the cemetery superintendent said as he sat in the shade of a camphor tree, surrounded by graves that date as far back as 1868. “They leave fresh fruit, too--bananas, apples, oranges. But we’ve been seeing a lot of coconuts.”

“It’s an offering,” suggested Spears’ assistant, Tim Chandler, 26, who has been working at the cemetery for nine months and has seen his share of weirdness too.

“Coconuts,” Spears said again, shaking his head at the mystery of it all.

Actually, Spears minds coconuts a lot less than he minds the other stuff people leave in his cemetery--the dead animals in particular. And he minds that stuff less than he minds the vandals who, with depressing frequency, knock over tombstones or commit other acts of vandalism.

A few weeks ago, for example, someone knocked over a 600-pound tombstone. Try wrestling one of those things back into place, Spears said. “Some people have no respect.”

It was the recurring vandalism at the 7.5-acre cemetery, not coconuts or Satanists, that recently led the Downey City Council to pass an ordinance limiting visiting hours to 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Previously, if groups of people were seen hanging around the cemetery at night, the police could do nothing unless they caught the vandals in an illegal act. Now, just being caught not dead in the cemetery after 8 p.m. will be illegal, although police are being advised to use discretion in making arrests.

Downey City Councilwoman Joyce L. Lawrence, a self-described cemetery buff, said the new ordinance is a much cheaper alternative than trying to gate and fence the graveyard, which is separated from surrounding streets only by a low concrete-block wall.

“It is a community resource that should be open to the community” as much as possible, Lawrence said.

All but a handful of the grave sites are either occupied or spoken for.

“We’ve got a waiting list of people who want to be in here,” Spears said. “Of course, not at this moment.” Spears has dibs on three plots himself.

The Downey Cemetery is, incidentally, one of the few remaining cemeteries where graves are dug the old-fashioned way, with hand shovels. Spears and Chandler do the digging.

The cemetery seems like a pleasant place to spend eternity, or even an hour or two. A lot of people in Downey use the cemetery to jog through or bike through or just sit under a tree. Nobody minds that.

“If people want to come in and have a picnic lunch, I guess that’s OK,” Lawrence said.

Golf, on the other hand, is not allowed.

One day last year a man came in to visit his wife’s grave and saw a kid playing pitch-and-putt on the grass. The City Council subsequently prohibited golf and other recreational sports at the cemetery.

Neither the golf ordinance nor the early closing hours ordinance, however, has addressed the recurring Satanism problem. Fortunately, Spears said, the Satanism craze seems to have tapered off somewhat in recent years.

“It’s not as bad as it used to be,” he said. “Now it’s mostly just birds that people leave. You know, you’ll find a pigeon with his head cut off. They’ll leave a sign, a burnt candle or nine pennies arranged in a certain way, next to the bird. Things like that.”

“I found a dead bird once, had ribbons tied around it,” Chandler said. “The ribbons had names written on them. It was a pigeon.”

“They’re getting more polite now,” Spears said. “Now a lot of times they’ll leave the dead bird in a plastic bag.”

“I’ve gotten to where I don’t even look in the bags anymore,” Chandler added, grimacing at a particularly disgusting memory. “I think I looked into one bag too many.”

“It was pretty bad a while back,” Spears said. “They were leaving some pretty big animals.”

How big? Well, Spears said, once somebody left a goat.

“We found the goat with his head decapitated,” Spears said. “The night after the goat incident they had a stakeout. Some guys from the ASPCA stayed in the office all night. They never caught any Satanists, but they caught some people pushing over some gravestones. They turned over 15 stones.”

“No respect,” Chandler said.

Spears said that most cemeteries, not just Downey’s, have occasional problems with dead animals and candles and coins arranged in mysterious configurations. He has no idea who the people involved are.

“I guess some of them are kids, some are adults,” Spears said. “There’s a lot of different ones.

“One day I was having lunch and I saw these two ladies drive up, professional-looking, wearing suits. They were standing by that tree for a long time, so finally I started walking over there and they got in their car and drove off. When I got to the tree, I saw they’d lighted a candle and left 35 cents in change arranged on the ground. What that meant I had no idea.

“Personally,” Spears said, “I think they’re nuts.”

He was not referring to coconuts.